GreenZap Files $57.5 Million Lawsuit Against Bloggers and Website Hosting Company

This is great stuff... someone posts something on a server that you own as a webhosting company, you get faced with a $57.5 million dollar lawsuit.

Full Story

Quote:
SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--GreenZap®, Inc. (Pink Sheets: GZPN) (the “Company”), an online payment provider, has filed a lawsuit against website-hosting-company Liquid Web, Inc. and Vodien, Inc. for a total of $57.5 million. The suit is the first of many GreenZap is preparing against individual bloggers and hosting companies that maintain websites where defamatory comments are being posted concerning GreenZap and its executives.

According to GreenZap Vice President Linda Murphy, attempts made by GreenZap to communicate with the bloggers were met with malicious attacks. GreenZap’s counsel sent several letters to Liquid Web, Inc. requesting it voluntarily shut down one of its hosted websites due to its harmful and libelous content, but to no avail. The registered owners of the website, Vodien, Inc., have a Singapore address and have ignored GreenZap in spite of the company’s attempts. In addition to the hosting company, GreenZap has been able to identify several individual bloggers responsible for many of the postings and intends to add them to the action.

According to GreenZap CEO Damon Westmoreland, “The websites are nothing more than an online soap opera. There is advertising on these sites and the owners are getting paid based on the traffic they receive. Our company grew quickly over the last year, acquiring over 750,000 users mostly in the direct sales market, which presented an opportunity for these cyber-offenders to ride our coat tails and make a buck by defaming our company.”

Ms. Murphy said the blogs have been damaging to the Company’s growth creating an ongoing cloud of mistrust that it is forced to address on a daily basis with its customers and strategic partners alike.

While the laws surrounding Internet user responsibility is still unclear, GreenZap is not the first party to commence an action against a hosting site. In October 2006, a Florida jury awarded one Sue Scheff $11.3 million in an Internet defamation lawsuit. The article revealed that Scheff filed a lawsuit after a blogger called her a “crook,” “con artist” and a “fraud” on an Internet message board.

“With this type of precedent, recognizing the harm done to Internet businesses by these false blogs, we believe we can prevail and put a stop to the baseless statements and claims surrounding our organization,” said Mr. Westmoreland.

About GreenZap, Inc.

GreenZap, Inc., a San Diego, California based company, enables any business or individual with an email address to send and receive money securely and cost-effectively online. GreenZap’s system resembles PayPal® (eBay’s payment processor), which reports over 100 million users and a 2005 total dollar volume of payments of $27.5 billion. GreenZap differentiates itself by charging flat-rate fees versus a percentage of each transaction, and rewards its customers for using GreenZap’s services. Since opening June 1, 2005, GreenZap has grown to over 760,000 users. In October 2006, the company expanded its services to include a classifieds section called ZapExchange.

For more information, please visit greenzap.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements in this release, and other written or oral statements made by the Company, including the use of the words “expect,” “anticipate,” “estimate,” “project,” “forecast,” “outlook,” “target,” “objective,” “plan,” “goal,” “pursue,” “on track,” and similar expressions, are “forward-looking statements” and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance, or achievements of the company to be different from those expressed or implied. The Company assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.

- Y! MyWeb

eek...


CDA of 1996

This looks like the Communications Decency Act of 1996 will be invoked to protect the ISP. It's nothing to write home about, in my opinion.


More eek...

http://www.scam.com/showthread.php?t=2190&page=1&pp=40
http://www.worldwidescam.info/ecoupdate2.htm

Even the San Diego BBB is in on the fun:

http://www.sandiego.bbb.org/commonreport.html?bid=20007693&language=1

I can't find a single nice thing about these guys on the web that isn't one of their own press releases or some shmoe posting how great it is while begging people to sign up through his ref code. Sounds like typical MLM to me.


Yes, webhosting companies

Yes, webhosting companies can in theory be held liable for the content they host. You need to climb mountains in the UK to get liability insurance if you're hosting - red flag for underwriters.

As for Greenzap - they've been posted as a scam on Platinax, a while after their affiliates poured in spamming the forum. Not a chance in hell I'm ever going to back down in the face of aggressive litigation threats again, so if Greenzap want to issue proceedings against me as well, I'm happy to deal with it.

Bottom line is that the Greenzap story reads as aggressive use of the law to silence valid customer complaints.

In which case, full support to Liquidweb, who are a pretty solid webhosting company - in the early days of Threadwatch it was one of their servers kept the site running smoothly in the face of continuous slashdottings.


ADDED: Yahoo! on

ADDED: Yahoo! on Greenzap:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/14102005/372/free-money-think.html

Doesn't read good.


now i get it. they need to

now i get it.
they need to win this case to pay out all the $25 sign ups.
interesting business model.


LOL, I really like this

LOL, I really like this quote from their "About" section: "GreenZap's system resembles PayPal® (eBay's payment processor), which reports over 100 million users and a 2005 total dollar volume of payments of $27.5 billion." Well, I guess that PayPal could be used to validate any other payment processor in the world in a similar way :-).


Back when RedZee was the

Back when RedZee was the talk, I was threatened with a lawsuit and personal harm (at various times) because of a post I made at SEF outlining my actual experiences with them.

I listed dollars spent, showed data from the logs to support the poor quality of the traffic and used it all to back up my decision to not use them again. (When someone sends you 10,000 visits in a weekend, you're happy. When the logs show those visitors have an average visit duration of 1.6 seconds, something's fishy...)

For the last 9 months-ish, they've been silent. I didn't react, they didn't pursue.

This whole thing strikes me as much the same, though Greenzap took the step of filing a suit. In the end, if this makes it to court, I'd hate to be the judge who has to decide if posting on a forum or blog is protected by free speech laws.

In the meantime, everyone gets the publicity...


The company's official

Quote:
The company's official contact phone number is a mobile number; its mailing address is a box number in a grocery store.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/14102005/372/free-money-think.html



Love this quote on the BBS

Love this quote on the BBS site:

Quote:
Most recently, the Bureau has been receiving complaints alleging that the company is charging their accounts $19.95 without authorization. Consumers are being told that this is a charge to verify their account. Consumers have been unable to get the charges reversed.

Give $25 for signing up, then charge $20 to show it exists. Curious. :)


Those aren't 25 real bucks

These are 25 web bucks. You can't withdraw them. Maybe you can spend them if you can find a real merchant who accepts GreenZap.